Barbelith Underground > Temple > Fiction Suit: A User's Manual

Originally posted by Jade Emperor:
>>What's Fiction Suit??
>>What's gestalt?

A fiction suit is like an on-site identity (ie; mine's expressionless). A gestalt is a merging of two or more beings into one (ie; if I were to merge with you, we may be called Jade Expressionless. The practicalities of our merging would have to be performed by e-mail to agree or posts, so it's not the kind of thing that should be a permanent arrangement. Perhaps to work together on a thread, that kind of thing. No idea whether it's even worth doing: I just like the idea as an experiment, and because it may spark some interesting debate about agendas in net identity).

Originally posted by Jade Emperor:
>>Could you explain it more deeply?

Our minds work by linking information. Every second, occurrences spark cascades of references, memories and related information. The idea was to take the concept of hyperlinks and build it into conversation, where individual word would form links to other sites where information related to the conversation would take place (ie; a conversation following my trail of "net thought"). It was supposed to be a joke, but suddenly I kept finding really pertinent stuff on the web that related not only to the specific conversation, but also to the nature of intertextuality, hyperlinks in non-linear narrative, and contextual truth. In other words, the sites I began finding (just from entering a conversation sentence into a search engine) linked not only to the intended reference but also to the nature of a hyperlinked conversation. I felt as though there were a significant overlap between my mind and the net, as though my consciousness had been enlarged by a factor of infinity. I'm sure if I'd carried on long enough I'd have run into stuff about net consciousness.

At that point, I would become Cyber Christ, and telephoned everyone in the world.

Originally posted by Jade Emperor:
>>How do you do it?

Subscribing to the theory that all points in time are the same, I posited that it would be possible to contact my future self using dreaming techniques. Entering a lucid state, I used the amend time/date functions on my digital watch to shift /(sideways)/ in time, entering the dreaming of my future self.

Of course, this method relies on assumptions (ie; will I be alive in 2012; will Barbelith still be running; will I still be able to access the old thread; etc. Lukily, in three weeks time, Tom will have access to new technology to prevent board crashes, meaning this incarnation of Barbelith will survive until said year). As a quicker, easier alternative, however, you could always copy

[ 26-04-0033: Message edited by: Jesus ]

out of someone else's post and paste it into yours, making whatever changes you like.

[ 29-09-2001: Message edited by: expressionless ]